Welcome to our first major post on decoding the Slovak language. If you’ve studied a Slavic language before, Slovak isn’t much different.
Nouns in Slovak are comprised of 3 genders: masculine, feminine and neuter.
And yes, their gender influences their declension [how word endings change to signal their role in a sentence].
This is why it’s key to know the gender of a word.
And, luckily for us, it’s rather easy to determine a word’s gender. Gender is determined by a noun’s ending.
| Masculine |
| hard consonant | dom [house] stôl [table] kvet [flower] pes [dog] jazyk [language] film [movie] |
| Feminine |
| –a or –ia | ruža [rose] žena [woman] mačka [cat] kniha [book] strana [page] fotograf ia [photograph] |
| soft consonant | posteľ [bed] kosť [bone] lekáreň [chemist] noc [night] |
| neuter |
| –e | srdce [heart] pole [field] počasie [weather] |
| –o | auto [car] pero [feather] rádio [radio] |
| –um | centrum [center] múzeum [museum] |
- If a noun denotes a masculine person (muž, futbalista, etc.), then it is masculine regardless of its ending. The same goes for nouns denoting a feminine person.
- Some exceptions are: deň m. [day], dieťa n. [child], cieľ m. [goal] and dievča n. [girl].
That’s all for this lesson.
My Slavic Studies 